Ill TECHNOLOGY and PERFORMANCE ISSUE • Mega-Pul]Petry • Automata • Siva Vs
FALL 2000 Issue $5.95 NTERNATIONAL ¥f ./ Ill TECHNOLOGY AND PERFORMANCE ISSUE • Mega-Pul]Petry • Automata • siva vs. Jesus John Ludwig's Wrestling Macheth the puppet in contemporary theatre, film & -•. 0 '74£7( 37511 6 heatre of the Ears by Mark Sussman LY'* SS* ~ And the advantage this puppet would have over living dancers? The advantage? First ofall ~ a negative one, my excellentfriend; namely, that it would never be afected. For affection appears as you know, when the soul (vis motrix) is found at any point other than the ~, movement's center (fgmvity - Heinrich von Kleist, "On the Marionette Theater," r- , 1#1~8**,9-~. tianslated by Roman Paska .4 Where is the soul in THEATER OFTHE EARS? And who. or what, is affected? Kleist's 1810 parable of life and death, animation and affect, raises questions posed by this company of artists working in Paris, New York, Rio de Janeiro. Lenox, and Valencia- where is the center of gravity of this electronic puppet show?In puppet theater most explicitly, "vis motrix" and "vis directrix" operate at a distance. In THE- ATER OF THE EARS, the operator- manipulator of the puppet's pixilated face, and controller of the three mobile audio speakers that race across the stage floor like a circus of R2D2,- works in the upstage shadows, behind a scrim. (That's me. When the piece was created at the Center for New Theater at CalArts in Fall, 1999, I was teaching at Janie Geiser's invitation at the Cotsen Center for Puppetry and the Arts, and I joined as pup- peteer.
[Show full text]